A Utah high school baseball coach has been placed on leave after he allegedly tried to use petroleum to dry out the school’s baseball field.
According to Salt Lake City Fox affiliate KSTU and the Standard-Examiner, the Clearfield (Utah) High School baseball team has been shut down due to the presence of contaminants on the field. Incredibly, the person responsible for those contaminants appears to be one of the team’s coaches, who spread diesel fuel across the field in an attempt to dry it out.
The effort was apparently a misguided attempt at employing the classic baseball groundskeeper trick of burning the infield dirt to dry out a puddle.
The issue here is that the coach in question allegedly failed to execute a controlled burn, instead spreading the fuel widely across the infield dirt and then apparently not using any burn whatsoever.
The result was a foul-smelling field and led to a complaint to the Davis County Health Department, which investigated the case and shut down the field because of a prevalent smell of gas.
Now, the Davis County Health Department has shut down the field until an environmental clean up firm can remedy the situation. It’s led Clearfield to have to start the season on the road, all while hoping against rain to keep the gas from moving into the soil even quicker.
For now, the important thing is that everyone is safe, even if Clearfield will have to compete on the road for the foreseeable future.
